Choose your titles wisely for better URLs

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 05:47:06 +0000

If your CMS generates URLs from page titles, choose those titles carefully. The slug becomes part of the URL and search engines use it as a ranking signal.

Use hyphens to separate words, not underscores. Google treats my-page-title as three distinct words but reads my_page_title as one mangled string.

Good:  /blog/choose-your-titles-wisely-for-better-urls
Bad:   /blog/choose_your_titles_wisely_for_better_urls

Keep titles short and descriptive. Avoid stop words where you can — “the”, “and”, “of” take up space in a URL without adding meaning. And watch out for special characters; they get mangled into ugly encoded strings.

SEO on Shafiq Alibhai

Choose your titles wisely for better URLs